They looked at the heavy iron rod Carol had given me.
They wanted what I had, if they could get it.
I wasn’t afraid. I was under the Earth and I was part iron rod. They could not get what I had. They knew it. That’s why there are always fewer killings than there might be. People always know.
I crossed to the other side of the channel, close to the wall. Watching them carefully. One of them, perhaps strong himself, perhaps merely stupider, stood up and, thrusting his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets, paralleled my passage down the channel away from them.
The channel continued to descend slightly, and we walked away from the oil drum and the light from the fire and the tired community of subterranean castoffs. I wondered idly when he would make his move, but I wasn’t worried. He watched me, trying to see me more clearly, it seemed, as we descended deeper into the darkness. And as the light receded he moved up closer, but didn’t cross the channel. I turned the bend first.
Waiting, I heard the sounds of rats in their nests.
He didn’t come around the bend.
I found myself beside a service niche in the tunnel wall, and stepped back into it. He came around the bend, on my side of the channel. I could have stepped out as he passed my hiding place, could have clubbed him to death with the iron rod before he realized that the stalker had become the stalked.
I did nothing, stayed far back motionless in the niche and let him pass. Standing there, my back to the slimy wall, listening to the darkness around me, utter, final, even palpable. But for the tiny twittering sounds of rats I could have been two miles down in the central chamber of some lost cavern maze.
There’s no logic to why it happened. At first, Carol had been just another casual liaison, another bright mind to touch, another witty personality to enjoy, another fine and workable body to work so fine with mine. I grow bored quickly. It’s not a sense of humor I seek—lord knows every slithering, hopping, crawling member of the animal kingdom has a sense of humor—for Christ sake even dogs and cats have a sense of humor—it’s wit! Wit is the answer. Let me touch a woman with wit and I’m gone, sold on the spot. I said to her, the first time I met her, at a support luncheon for the Liberal candidate for D.A., “Do you fool around?”
“I don’t fool,” she said instantly, no time-lapse, no need for rehearsal, fresh out of her mind, “fools bore me. Are you a fool?”
I was delighted and floored at the same time. I went fumfuh-fumfuh, and she didn’t give me a moment. “A simple yes or no will suffice. Answer this one: how many sides are there to a round building?”
I started to laugh. She watched me with amusement, and for the first time in my life I actually saw someone’s eyes twinkle with mischief. “I don’t know,” I said, “how many sides are there to a round building?”
“Two,” she answered, “inside and outside. I guess you’re a fool. No, you may not take me to bed.” And she walked away.
I was undone. She couldn’t have run it better if she had come back two minutes in a time machine, knowing what I’d say, and programmed me into it. And so I chased her. Up hill and down dale, all around that damned dreary luncheon, till I finally herded her into a corner—which was precisely what she’d been going for.
“As Bogart said to Mary Astor, ‘You’re good, shweetheart, very very good.’” I said it fast, for fear she’d start running me around again. She settled against the wall, a martini in her hand; and she looked up at me with that twinkling.
At first it was just casual. But she had depth, she had wiliness, she had such an air of self-possession that it was inevitable I would start phasing-out the other women, would start according her the attention she needed and wanted and without demanding…demanded.
I came to care.
Why didn’t I take precautions? Again, there’s no logic to it. I thought she was; and for a while, she was. Then she stopped. She told me she had stopped, something internal, the gynecologist had suggested she go off the pill for a while. She suggested vasectomy to me. I chose to ignore the suggestion. But chose not to stop sleeping with her.
When I called Denise and Joanna, and told them Carol was pregnant, they sighed and I could see them shaking their heads sadly. They said they considered me a public menace, but told me to tell her to come down to the Abortion Center and they would put the suction pump to work. I told them, hesitantly, that it had gone too long, suction wouldn’t work. Joanna simply snarled, “You thoughtless cocksucker!” and hung up the extension. Denise read me the riot act for twenty minutes. She didn’t suggest a vasectomy; she suggested, in graphic detail, how I might have my organ removed by a taxidermist using a cheese grater. Without benefit of anesthesia.
But they came, with their dilation and curettage implements, and they laid her out on the teak table with a mattress under her, and then they had gone—Joanna pausing a moment at the door to advise me this was the last time, the last time, the very last time she could stomach it, that it was the last time and did I have that fixed firmly, solidly, imbedded in the forefront of my brain? The last time.
And now I was here in the sewers.
I tried to remember what Carol looked like, but it wasn’t an image I could fix in my mind half as solidly as I had fixed the thought that this. Was. The. Last. Time.
I stepped out of the service niche.
The young-old bindlestiff who had followed me was standing there, silently waiting. At first I couldn’t even see him—there was only the vaguest lighter shade of darkness to my left, coming from around the bend and that oil drum full of fire—but I knew he was there. Even as he had known I was there, all the time. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t speak, and after a while I was able to discern his shape. Hands still deep in his pockets.
“Something?” I said, more than a little belligerently.
He didn’t answer.
“Get out of my way.”
He stared at me, sorrowfully, I thought, but that had to be nonsense. I thought.
“Don’t make me have to hurt you,” I said.
He stepped aside, still watching me.
I started to move past him, down the channel.
He didn’t follow, but I was walking backward to keep him in sight, and he didn’t take his eyes off mine.
I stopped. “What do you want?” I asked. “Do you need some money?”
He came toward me. Inexplicably, I wasn’t afraid he would try something. He wanted to see me more clearly, closer. I thought.
“You couldn’t give me nothing I need.” His voice was rusted, pitted, scarred, unused, unwieldy.
“Then why are you following me?”
“Why’ve you come down here?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You make it bad down here, mister. Why don’t you g’wan and go back upside, leave us alone?”
“I have a right to be here.” Why had I said that?
“You got no right to come down here; stay back upside where you belong. All of us know you make it bad, mister.”
He didn’t want to hurt me, he just didn’t want me here. Not even right for these outcasts, the lowest level to which men could sink; even here I was beneath contempt. His hands were deep in his pockets. “Take your hands out of your pockets, slowly, I want to make sure you aren’t going to hit me with something when I turn around. Because I’m going on down there, not back. Come on now, do it. Slowly. Carefully.”
He took his hands out of his pockets slowly, and held them up. He had no hands. Chewed stumps, glowing faintly green like the walls where I had descended from the manhole.
I turned and went away from him.
It grew warmer, and the phosphorescent green slime on the walls gave some light. I had descended as the channel had fallen away deeper under the city. This was a land not even the noble streetworkers knew, a land blasted by silence and emptiness. Stone above and below and around, it carried the river without a name into the depths, and if I could not return, I would stay here like the skids. Ye
t I continued walking. Sometimes I cried, but I don’t know why, or for what, or for whom. Certainly not for myself.
Was there ever a man who had everything more than I had had everything? Bright words, and quick movements, soft cloth next to my skin, and places to place my love, if I had only recognized that it was love.
I heard a nest of rats squealing as something attacked them, and I was drawn to a side tunnel where the shining green effluvium made everything bright and dark as the view inside the machines they used to have in shoe stores. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Until they found out that the X-rays could damage the feet of children, shoe stores used bulky machines one stepped up onto, and into which one inserted newly shod feet. And when the button was pushed a green X-ray light came on, showing the bones that lay beneath the flesh. Green and black. The light was green, and the bones were dusty black. I hadn’t thought of that in years, but the side tunnel was illuminated in just that way.
An alligator was ripping the throats of baby rats.
It had invaded the nest and was feeding mercilessly, tossing the bodies of the ripped and shredded rodents aside as it went for the defenseless smaller ones. I stood watching, sickened but fascinated. Then, when the shrieks of anguish were extinguished at last, the great saurian, direct lineal descendant of Rex, snapped them up one by one and, thrashing its tail, turned to stare at me.
He had no hands. Chewed stumps, glowing faintly green like the walls.
I moved back against the wall of the side tunnel as the alligator belly-crawled past me, dragging its leash. The thick, armored tail brushed my ankle and I stiffened.
Its eyes glowed red as those of an Inquisition torturer.
I watched its scaled and taloned feet leave deep prints in the muck underfoot, and I followed the beast, its trail clearly marked by the impression of the leash in the mud.
Frances had a five-year-old daughter. She took the little girl for a vacation to Miami Beach one year. I flew down for a few days. We went to a Seminole village, where the old women did their sewing on Singer machines. I thought that was sad. A lost heritage, perhaps; I don’t know. The daughter, whose name I can’t recall, wanted a baby alligator. Cute. We brought it back on the plane in a cardboard box with air holes. Less than a month later it had grown large enough to snap. Its teeth weren’t that long, but it snapped. It was saying: this is what I’ll be: direct lineal descendant of Rex. Frances flushed it down the toilet one night after we’d made love. The little girl was asleep in the next room. The next morning, Frances told her the alligator had run off.
The sewers of the city are infested with full-grown alligators. No amount of precaution and no forays by hunting teams with rifles or crossbows or flame throwers have been able to clear the tunnels. The sewers are still infested; workers go carefully. So did I.
The alligator moved steadily, graceful in its slithering passage down one tunnel and into another side passage and down always down, steadily into the depths. I followed the trail of the leash.
We came to a pool and it slid into the water like oil, its dead-log snout above the fetid foulness, its Torquemada eyes looking toward its destination.
I thrust the iron rod down my pant leg, pulled my belt tight enough to hold it, and waded into the water. It came up to my neck and I lay out and began dog-paddling, using the one leg that would bend. The light was very green and sharp now.
The saurian came out on the muck beach at the other side and crawled forward toward an opening in the tunnel wall. I crawled out, pulled the iron rod loose, and followed. The opening gave into darkness, but as I passed through, I trailed my hand across the wall and felt a door. I stopped, surprised, and felt in the darkness. An iron door, with an arched closure at the top and a latch. Studs, heavy and round and smelling faintly of rust, dotted the door.
I walked through…and stopped.
There had been something else on the door. I stepped back and ran my fingers over the open door again. I found the indentations at once, and ran my fingertips across them, trying to discern in the utter darkness what they were. Something about them…I traced them carefully.
They were letters. C. My fingers followed the curves. R. Cut into the iron somehow. O. What was a door doing down here? A. The cuts seemed very old, weathered, scummy. T. They were large and very regular. O. They made no sense, no word formed that I knew. A. And I came to the end of the sequence. N.
CROATOAN. It made no sense. I stayed there a moment, trying to decide if it was a word the sanitation engineers might have used for some designation of a storage area perhaps. Croatoan. No sense. Not Croatian, it was Croatoan. Something nibbled at the back of my memory: I had heard the word before, knew it from somewhere, long ago, a vapor of sound traveling back on the wind of the past. It escaped me, I had no idea what it meant.
I went through the doorway again.
Now I could not even see the trail of the leash the alligator had dragged. I kept moving, the iron rod in my hand.
I heard them coming toward me from both sides, and it was clearly alligators, many of them. From side passages. I stopped and reached out to find the wall of the channel. I couldn’t find it. I turned around, hoping to get back to the door, but when I hurried back the way I thought I had come, I didn’t reach the door. I just kept going. Either I had gone down a fork and not realized the channel had separated, or I had lost my sense of direction. And the slithering sounds kept coming.
Now, for the first time, I felt terror! The safe, warm, enfolding darkness of the underworld had, in an instant, merely by the addition of sounds around me, become a suffocating winding-sheet. It was as if I’d abruptly awakened in a coffin, buried six feet beneath the tightly stomped loam; that clogging terror Poe had always described so well because he had feared it himself…the premature burial. Caves no longer seemed comfortable.
I began to run!
I lost the rod somewhere, the iron bar that had been my weapon, my security.
I fell and slid face first in the muck.
I scrabbled to my knees and kept going. No walls, no light, no slightest aperture or outcropping, nothing to give me a sense of being in the world, running through a limbo without beginning, without end.
Finally, exhausted, I slipped and fell and lay for a moment. I heard slithering all around me and managed to pull myself to a sitting position. My back grazed a wall, and I fell up against it with a moan of gratitude. Something, at least; a wall against which to die.
I don’t know how long I lay there, waiting for the teeth.
Then I felt something touching my hand. I recoiled with a shriek! It had been cold and dry and soft. Did I recall that snakes and other amphibians were cool and dry? Did I remember that? I was trembling.
Then I saw light. Flickering, bobbing, going up and down just slightly, coming toward me.
And as the light grew closer and brighter, I saw there was something right beside me; the something that had touched me; it had been there for a time, watching me.
It was a child.
Naked, deathly white, with eyes great and luminous, but covered with a transparent film as milky as a membrane, small, very young, hairless, its arms shorter than they should have been, purple and crimson veins crossing its bald skull like traceries of blood on a parchment, fine even features, nostrils dilating as it breathed shallowly, ears slightly tipped as though reminiscent of an elf, barefooted but with pads on the soles, this child stared at me, looked up at me, its little tongue visible as it opened its mouth filled with tiny teeth, trying to form sounds, saying nothing, watching me, a wonder in its world, watching me with the saucer eyes of a lemur, the light behind the membrane flickering and pulsing. This child.
And the light came nearer, and the light was many lights. Torches, held aloft by the children who rode the alligators.
Beneath the city, there is yet another city: wet and dark and strange.
At the entrance to their land someone—not the children, they couldn’t have done it—long ago built a road
sign. It is a rotted log on which has been placed, carved from fine cherrywood, a book and a hand. The book is open, and the hand rests on the book, one finger touching the single word carved in the open pages. The word is CROATOAN.
On August 13, 1590, Governor John White of the Virginia colony managed to get back to the stranded settlers of the Roanoke, North Carolina, colony. They had been waiting three years for supplies, but politics, foul weather and the Spanish Armada had made it impossible. As they went ashore, they saw a pillar of smoke. When they reached the site of the colony, though they found the stronghold walls still standing against possible Indian attacks, no sign of life greeted them. The Roanoke colony had vanished. Every man, woman, and child, gone. Only the word CROATOAN had been left. “One of the chiefe trees or postes at the right side of the entrance had the barke taken off, and 5. foote from the ground in fayre Capitall letters was grauen CROATOAN without any crosse or signe of distresse.”
There was a Croatan island, but they were not there. There was a tribe of Hatteras Indians who were called Croatans, but they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the lost colony. All that remains of legend is the story of the child Virginia Dare, and the mystery of what happened to the lost settlers of Roanoke.
Down here in this land beneath the city live the children. They live easily and in strange ways. I am only now coming to know the incredible manner of their existence. How they eat, what they eat, how they manage to survive, and have managed for hundreds of years, these are all things I learn day by day, with wonder surmounting wonder.
I am the only adult here.
They have been waiting for me.
They call me father.
* * *
Jeffty Is Five
1978 Hugo Award: Best Short Story; Locus Poll Award: Best Short Story; Nebula Award: Short Story
The Top of the Volcano Page 22
